and drunkenness and beastly vices prevail, we shall find that
though all die before old age, the communities are abundantly
recruited by the children which they produce. Men, principles,
habits, ideas, vices, all have children, whose features betray
their parentage; so that no parent has a right to expect a child
to be better than its father and mother. On the contrary, he has
every reason to believe that every thing that a child sees wrong
in the parents, will be imitated. There is no way by which bad
parents can bring up a family well. There must be in the parental
life good principles, a sweet and equable temper, a tender and
loving disposition, a firm self-control, a pleasant deportment,
and a conscientious devotion to duty, or these will not be found
in the life of the children. Bad seed, sown in the quick soil of a
child's mind, is sure to spring up, and to bear fruit after its
kind. No sensible man ever dreams of gathering figs from thistles,
or grapes from bramble-bushes, and no man has the slightest right
to suppose that he can bring up a family to be better than he is.
The plant will be true to the seed.

We are in the habit of hearing that the children of a certain
neighborhood, or school, or town, are extraordinarily bad
children. Great wonder is sometimes expressed in regard to such
instances, when, really, they are not wonderful at all. When
children are unusually bad, parents are unusually bad, or, if they
are not bad-hearted, they are wrong-headed. I ought, perhaps, to
say here that I have known an irascible, tyrannical, unjust and
cruel school-teacher to spoil a neighborhood of children, when the
parents were without any special fault, save that of failing to
thrust him out of the charge which he had abused. But usually the
fault is at home. If the seed planted there be good, it will